NOVEMBER 2023 – Last month, at the invitation of The Kennedy Forum, I delivered a keynote titled, The Philanthropic Role in Funding Mental Health at the Alignment for Progress Conference. Today, I share a recap of that keynote for your consideration and feedback.
I began by reflecting upon the life and legacy of Dorothea Dix, one of the original philanthropists to focus on the decriminalization of mental illness. After witnessing the abhorrent treatment of people with mental illness in a Massachusetts jail and in other states across the nation, Dorothea, with inherited wealth, set out to build a framework for community-based treatment.
Known by many as the mother of the asylum movement, Dorothea understood that access to community-based mental health treatment was a local issue that would benefit from federal support. Dorothea successfully advocated for care in communities in 30 states and persuaded Congress to pass the nation’s first federal legislation to fund mental health in 1854. This law sought to designate federal land upon which to establish hospitals for those with mental illness. However, President Franklin Pierce refused to sign the law as he believed that mental health — along with other forms of social welfare services — were matters best addressed by the states and not the federal government.
OCTOBER 2023 - In philanthropy, impact measurement seeks to ensure accountability for grants made, effectiveness of the intervention/program, and organizational willingness to change course as the data reveals the need to do so. Yet not all organizations have equal capacity to undertake impact measurement. This is particularly true in the work to decriminalize mental illness, which is complex — lacking standardized data collection tools across interventions and suffering from siloed data between systems.
AUGUST 2023 – As a person who grew up inside a social service organization on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s — the early days of the deinstitutionalization of people with mental illness — I have a lack of patience when it comes to finding solutions to complex social problems. Why am I so impatient? Human lives are at stake. Compassion, creativity, and curiosity (the 3-Cs, as I think of them) are the key ingredients to forging change. My impatience motivates me on all 3-C fronts to find and foster nontraditional solutions to complex problems, including the decriminalization of mental illness.
The Foundation recently kicked off a series of Global Solution Labs to surface more knowledge and perspectives about how to create a future where mental illness is not treated as a crime. Over 50 multidisciplinary “Solutionists” gathered on May 7, 2021, to take on the ambitious task of identifying the top solutions to move the needle on the decriminalization of mental illness.
In the spirit of collaboration, we recently hosted a Virtual Book Club featuring authors and renowned psychiatrist Dr. James Knoll and renowned psychologist Dr. Joel Dvoskin. Led by Sozosei Board Member, Mary Chi Michael, Dr. Knoll and Dr. Dvoskin discussed their contribution to the recently released book, “Decriminalizing Mental Illness” with more than 100 attendees.